'Spoken Word' movie review: This family drama has a poetic bent but a familiar plot

The film "Spoken Word," Kuno Becker portrays a famous poet who travels to see his dying father.

Victor Nunez is an interesting director of intimate films that, unfortunately, never move beyond a few intimate theaters.

“Ruby in Paradise,” back in 1993, was a lovely coming-of-age story with a young Ashley Judd — but the picture never really caught on. (Nor, really, did Judd, whose career has been here, there and nowhere ever since.)

“Ulee’s Gold,” released in 1997, was an offbeat picture about a beekeeping hermit, and featured a revelatory performance from Peter Fonda. Yet it, too, played to smaller crowds than it deserved.

Nunez, who doesn’t work enough (he’s made only nine films in 40 years) is back again with “Spoken Word.” Like his earlier films, it’s about working-class lives and neighborhoods off the beaten track.

Unlike those earlier pictures, though, it’s not very good.

The likely difference is that Nunez wrote those two other movies; this script is the joint effort between a first-timer, Joe Ray Sandoval (who seems to have contributed the awkwardness), and an old-time TV hack, William T. Conway (who probably provided the clichés).

Their story has Kuno Becker playing a famous spoken-word artist — yes, apparently there are such things, at least in San Francisco — who gets a call that his father is dying. Will he come back to New Mexico for Thanksgiving?

Will old wounds be reopened?

It’s as sure as turkey for dinner, and it begins playing out predictably as soon as his grumpy dad — Rubén Blades, long past his “Crossover Dreams” days — sees the famous spoken-word artist’s rental car roll into town.

Oh, and there’s a vintage Impala in the garage, the old man’s pride and joy, which he’s never let his irresponsible son drive. You want to predict how that’s going to play out?

Blades is quietly authentic as the proud old man, and Nunez directs this in an interesting (and for him, unfamiliar) style, drawing on the subject matter to bridge scenes with poetry and fast, almost subliminal imagery.

Movie Review

Spoken Word

(Unrated) Variance (116 min.)

Directed by Victor Nunez. With Kuno Becker, Rubén Blades. Now playing in New York.

But Becker isn’t very interesting as the poet, even though the script, in vain hope of making him compelling, keeps peppering him with problems:

His best friend killed himself!

His mother died when he was little!

His father doesn’t hug him!

Yeah, well, he’s also a grown-up. So quit your beefing and man up a little, would you?

But he can’t — because then we wouldn’t have this soap opera for chauvinists, with guys filling themselves with Stoli and inarticulate self-pity, while their understanding women nod and stay out of their way.

It all ends the way movies like this eventually end — with peace brokered, all old failings forgiven, and our hero “courageously” telling off the town’s token bad guy, while surrounded by supportive friends. Who could have seen that one coming?

Not me. But then, I’d have predicted that Victor Nunez would have been a good, populist filmmaker by now.